"Joe Haldeman - Four Short Novels" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

In preparation for his crime wave, Bad Billy had spent years making a hundred farlies of
himself, and he stored them in cool dry places out of direct sunlight, all around the world. On 13
May 2999, all but one of those farlies jump-started itself and went out to destroy the nearest
Farlie Center.
By noon, GMT, police and militia all over the world had captured or killed or subdued every
copy (but one) of Bad Billy, but by noon every single Farlie Center in the world had been leveled,
save the one in Akron, Ohio.
The only people left who had farlies were people who had a reason to keep them in a secret
place. Master criminals like Billy. Pals of Billy. They all were waiting at Akron, and held off
the authorities for months, by making farlie after farlie of themselves, like broomsticks in a
Disney cartoon, sending most of them out to die, or “die,” defending the place, until there were
so many of them the walls were bulging. Then they sent out word that they wanted to negotiate, and
during the lull that promise produced, they fled en masse, destroying the last Farlie Center
behind them.
They were a powerful force, a hundred thousand hardened criminals united in their contempt for
people like you and me, and in their loyalty to Bad Billy Beerbreath. Somewhat giddy, not to say
insane, in their triumph after having destroyed every Farlie Center, they went on to destroy every
jail and prison and courthouse. That did cut their numbers down considerably, since most of them
only had ten or twenty farlies tucked away, but it also reduced drastically the number of police,
not to mention the number of people willing to take up policing as a profession, since once
somebody killed you twice, you had to stay dead.
By New Year’s Eve, A.D. 3000, the criminals were in charge of the whole world.
Again.

War and Peace


EVENTUALLY IT CAME TO PASS that no one ever had to die, unless they wanted to, or could be
talked into it. That made it very hard to fight wars, and a larger and larger part of every
nation’s military budget was given over to psychological operations directed toward their own


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people: dulce et decorum est just wasn’t convincing enough anymore.
There were two elements to this sales job. One was to romanticize the image of the soldier as
heroic defender of the blah blah blah. That was not too hard; they’d been doing that since Homer.
The other was more subtle: convince people that every individual life was essentially worthless —
your own and also the lives of the people you would eventually be killing.
That was a hard job, but the science of advertising, more than a millennium after Madison
Avenue, was equal to it, through the person of a genius named Manny O’Malley. The pitch was
subtle, and hard for a person to understand who hasn’t lived for centuries, but shorn of Manny’s
incomprehensible humor and appeal to subtle pleasures that had no name until the thirtieth
century, it boiled down to this:
A thousand years ago, they seduced people into soldiering with the slogan, “Be all that you
can be.” But you have been all you can be. The only thing left worth being is not being.
Everybody else is in the same boat, O’Malley convinced them. In the process of giving yourself
the precious gift of nonexistence, share it with many others.
It’s hard for us to understand. But then we would be hard for them to understand, with all